Inception

I've seen Inception twice now. I have a greater respect for Leonardo Dicaprio after this movie. The main plot involves an extremely wicked business - playing God with people's minds through dreams pirating. The plot deals with metaphysical and theological matters, like how God sovereignly gives thought and inspiration to man, how love and rejection affect us in that process, and how the real is ultimately found only after this life - the unreal is lower and full of thought but as Ariadne, the "Architect" says, "You have to go up to the real." Thus, heaven, the up, is the most real, while that which is down in the depths of man's dark soul and flesh is less stable. In fact, at the end of the movie, the limbo in which Cobb's projection of his deceased wife lives, is crumbling to pieces. The movie folds over on itself and reflects itself, like the 1st dream sequence Ariadne experiences in which she folds the city on itself and moves large mirror doors to change reality. Notice that the last scene is the thimble spinning and not falling down. Cobb had explained that his wife had used the thimble to help her keep dream and reality separate - if the thimble fell down after spinning, it was real. So the movie leaves two alternatives: Either Cobb is still in a dream state, or the real is in the afterlife. I choose the latter.

However, the main theme is not in the main plot; it's in the subplot, which involves Cobb's struggle with guilt, his wife's death, wanting to keep his wife in a dream so he can correct the past, and how that keeps him from experiencing reality. Cobb keeps going back to his wife in the dream world because he blames himself for her death. But he is at risk of losing himself in that dream world. Ariadne sees him in the warehouse from which they work using the dream kit to go see his dead wife. He appears to use dreams like a drug. The sentence keeps being repeated: "To become an old man, full of regret, dying alone." It is the danger of living in a dream world instead of God's world of reality, of normality, like the simple daily sight of children's faces. Cobb cannot see his children because of the threat of prosecution for his wife's death that he faces and because in the dreams, his children are not real, while he sees his wife's face, the face of a dead person.

Notice the difference and similarity of Cobb and his wife. Cobb has experienced trouble distinguishing between the dream and the real, but while his wife wants to go down into her subconsciousness, Cobb knows he must go up toward God's reality. That's ultimately why he can escape his wife's fate - he wants to see his children's real faces and turns his head away to avoid seeing their faces in the dream world, lest he want to stay there. His wife wants to go down partly because she can no longer tell the difference between God's reality and her own dream world; they are all the same to her, so she simply chooses the one she felt most secure with her husband. She uses the word "feel" in an attempt toward the end of the movie to convince her husband to stay in the limbo dream world forever. It's hard to do while watching the movie (that is part of its effectiveness; we live Cobb's difficulty), but remember that every time we see Cobb's wife, except for a few scenes in the middle of the movie, she is merely Cobb's projection of his memory of his wife. That is what is so diabolical about the dream world - it seems real but isn't.

The movie reflects upon itself by beginning with Cobb meeting Sato in the limbo world, which is actually a scene from the end of the movie. But that technique emphasizes the critical importance of the words about being an old man full of regret. Sato has become an old man in that scene, and Cobb is looking at himself, what he would become if he allowed the dream world to swallow him. The starting of the movie with that scene, leaves us hanging in suspense, then the ending shows us what it really means for the plot. But the real meaning is not for the sake of the plot, it is for the sake of Cobb and his dilemma, the real theme of the movie. Also, Cobb reflects his wife, who are both deeply involved in living and building in the dream world. However, even though they both build in the dream world, that part of the world falls apart; it's the relationships that last, that can travel from one world to the next. You can be deceived about whom one is talking to in the dream world, but the reality of the relationship with the person is constant. The victim of the scheme, the heir to the corporate conglomerate, reflects this fact. His inheritance of the corporation is much less important to him than his relationship with his father. Thus, the plot involving changing his opinion as to what his father thought of him reflects the theme involving the Cobb and his unreal, dreamworld wife. Cobb undergoes a transformation by rejecting his imagined projection of his dead wife and facing up to reality, but he does so while creating a false imagination of the corporate heir's father in that heir's mind. This is an inverse reflection, sort of like a fun house mirror that distorts the reality of our appearance in some odd way.